GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



much staring at them, or too much east wind, or through mere 

 delicacy . . . the three bits of gooseberries, instead of growing- 

 larger, grew every day less, till they reached the smallness of pin- 

 heads and dropped on the ground ! I could have cried when the 

 last one went ! " She was more fortunate with the ivy that she 

 brought from her mother's house at Templans ivy that still 

 clothes the old brick wall at Cheyne Row, 



I fancy they employed no regular gardener during the years of 

 their poverty. Carlyle himself kept the grass trim and tidy, and 

 in 1837 he writes to John Sterling : " I have done nothing of 

 late but dig earth and rubbish in the little garden so called." 



" The little garden so called " was to Carlyle a refuge " from the 

 irrational, inarticulate spectacle of the streets " ; but he elsewhere 

 says their tumult is becoming to him " a kind of marching music 

 as he walked along, following his own thoughts, undisturbed by it." 

 Gardening, however, was better exercise and recreation for him than 

 walking, insomuch as he could not both think and dig. And he 

 hated London, which he designated as " The Devil's Own with 

 its dirt and noises." 



In an entry in his diary in the dog-days of 1838, he tells how heat 

 and indigestion making sleep impossible, he went downstairs in his 

 nightshirt to smoke in the " back yard." " It was one of the 

 beautifullest nights ; the half-moon clear as silver looked out as 

 from an eternity, and the great dawn was streaming up. I felt a 

 remorse, a kind of shudder at the fuss I was making about a sleep- 

 less night, about my sorrows at all, with a life so soon to be absorbed 

 into the great mystery above and around me. Oh, let us be 

 patient ! Let us call to God with our silent hearts if we cannot 

 with our tongues." 



Once again, in a very hot August, many years later, unable 

 to sleep, and Mrs. Carlyle away, he descended, at 3 a.m., to the 

 garden, " and smoked a cigar on a stool." The same soft mood 

 again inspired him as on the earlier occasion : " Have not seen so 

 lovely, sad and grand a summer weather scene, for twenty years back. 

 Trees stood all as if cast in bronze, not an aspen-leaf stirring ; sky 

 was a silver mirror, getting yellowish in the north-east, and one 

 big star, star of the morning, visible in the increasing light." 



Earlier in that same year (1857) Mrs. Carlyle's health had begun 

 to fail, and he had induced her to go to Scotland. Writing to his 



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